Venom – Original Fan Art

This week I tried a black and white drawing of a major Marvel Comic character – Venom. I haven’t read many superhero comics so I don’t know that much about him except that Venom is a living symbiotic suit which to some extent takes over the person wearing it. Initially he was very definitely a big villain, up there with Doc Oct and the Green Goblin, but later he became more of an anti-hero. I drew him because I think the design is really good and would work really well in a greyscale image like this.

He first appeared in the Amazing Spiderman comicbook and was written by David Michelinie and drawn by Todd McFarlane, but, interestingly, his original concept came from a fan from Illinois who was paid a huge sum for the idea! How very cool it would be to be that fan!!!

So I began with a pencil sketch…

Then I put in my outline and filled in my solid black areas…

Once that was done I rendered the shape more carefully with ink and added some white gouache to give it some contrast. Here is the finished character…

In terms of how this drawing went I found most of it pretty OK to draw except for Venom’s left leg (on the right-hand-side as we look at it.) For some reason I found it really hard to get it to look right. I’m still not quite sure about it. I think I’ve looked at it so much now that I can’t really see in my mind how it should be anymore. So I did the best I could and left it at that.

It was quite fun to draw a superhero, but I do prefer drawing animals.

(Just so that everything is clear and “up-front”. I made this as an original drawing of Marvel’s Venom. While I drew every part of it, the character is Marvel’s intellectual property and this is just fan art.)

Direct Ink – Quick Sketches

Over the last couple of months I have done less art since I’ve been struggling with my health. This week I have a small group of quick sketches drawn fast, in ink, with no pencils. I was doing all of this while watching Netflix and YouTube in bed one evening.

For my midtone I used a brush pen loaded with water darkened by a tiny drop of ink. It was good except that I couldn’t easily paint a gradient. I played around with it until I found a way to do it by smudging off some of the ink with a combination of my fingers and some kitchen towel.

At first I was quite nervous using ink without any basic pencil shapes to indicate structure. It felt like I was trying to put up a building with no structural support – I thought the whole thing might collapse in on itself. I began by drawing a young Obi-Wan Kenobi (since I was very familiar with Ewan McGregor’s face from watching the ABSOLUTELY AWESOME Kenobi series on Disney + three times over!) This is him as a Padawan though, looking all eager and ready to take on some battle droids…

Next I drew a woman in bed from a Netflix series I was watching…

She looked all cosy and comfy and I really wanted to capture that feeling. This was easier that drawing Kenobi despite the more difficult subject. I think a lot of my difficulty with drawing young Obi-Wan was just my nervousness of drawing directly in ink. The second time was definitely better.

My last drawing was of a seal – by this time I was a bit more confident and it was a dead easy subject. So here he is looking all happy on his rock…

I think he’s thinking “This is such a cool rock. All the lady seals are going to love me now!”

Results of this exercise

I think this was a really good exercise. It stretched me a little without being stressful and was really great for confidence building. I found it better to draw in a rough way so that it felt like I was sketching in pencil even though I was using ink. It was good to see what I could come up with like this because normally my sketches get erased once I have my ink outline done.

I was reading about an artist on the internet who draws daily directly in ink making portraits on public transport. I think this would be a great exercise, but I’m not sure I’d have the courage. Drawing outside gives me a much greater sense of inspiration from what I see but people are always very curious about what I’m doing which is tricky.

I have some mental health difficulties going on at the moment as well as ongoing sinus, ear and chest infections, so going outside is pretty difficult. I’ll have to think about it.

Trinity Portrait – ink, pencils and digital colour

I spent a lot of time in bed at the beginning of this week and played around with portraits in my small sketchbook. I drew a few quick sketches of various people from Netflix and YouTube. I was working on finding out which parts of a portrait I need to measure (as a proportion of my pencil) and which bits I can just do by eye . This is a portrait based on Carrie-Ann Moss who I always remember playing Trinity in the film The Matrix although I redid her hair to make it longer than she had then.

Above are the very basic marks I made when I began. You can see where I am making some measurements.

I developed this into a rough ink sketch. Although it’s really rough and doesn’t have a good likeness I really liked the way it turned out…

At this point I decided to make a better drawing in a bigger sketchbook. I used my trusty mocron pens. I particularly like using my big 0.5 pen. Through use the end has become blunted but I can get really great fine lines and textures by using it leaned over on it’s side at about 45 degrees to the paper. Below is the drawing I made copying my drawing and tweaking various bits of it to try to get more of a likeness. You can see the textural stuff I did in her hair…

Once I had the inks down I wanted to add some shading but wasn’t sure how I wanted to approach this. So I photocopied my drawing and then played around with various types of hatching and mark making to see if I could find something I liked…

I liked the bottom left bit of hatching which followed the contours of her body best, but didn’t like it enough to actually use it. In the end I decided to add shading with pencils. I shaded lightly and then used my fingers and a blending stick to smudge the tones. I also used a kneaded eraser to pull out some white areas in the line of her neck and across her nose and collar bones.

Here is the finished drawing…

Once I had photographed the drawing and pulled it into photoshop I also experimented with pushing my portrait to the right of the frame. I really liked this. I find it interesting how the space, the nothingness, around Carrie changes the feeling of the picture.

Later in the week when I was feeling a bit better I fired up Clip Studio Paint again and had a go at adding some colour. I tried to follow a similar process to the colour work I did on the Dandelion picture I did a while back. Here it is…

I think I prefer the greyscale image personally. Which do you prefer?